Seeking and overlaying

Work is usually work, and I rarely write about it in any social media anymore. However, the past week or so has had me working with some old materials. We're building or matching together bibliographical records for thousands of materials that have insufficient records, making them very hard to find in the catalog. Some of what I have to look for is pretty easy, others a moderate challenge, still others make me bang my head on the desk - in a good way of course. I do enjoy the work, the search process, the matching of records and organization.

This is what 1849 looks like.



A simple math primer. I get a weird charge working with items that were printed when Zachary Taylor was president. The materials I've been working on are very diverse, tax laws, midwifery, a treatise on infidelity that had the date of purchase inscribed, hand written by the owner of the book - a certain Mr. Orton, in 1853.

Then there was this, from 1869. I liked the cover.

There is a lot to go through, in many different languages. It makes me think about preservation and storage, a major issue in libraries that have depositories. What do we do with the stuff? Even in the digital age not everything is available online, nor can it be found at the Gutenberg Project or Google Books. Space is becoming tighter and tighter though. Decisions have to be made. May those wiser than me be making the correct ones.

Fixing a Hole

Today was a first for me in my twenty years of living in Columbus. I got to see the inside of Greenlawn Abbey.



Built in 1927, it was a very ornate final resting place for many of the Columbus' wealthy. Notables here include former city leaders, the brother of J.C. Penney, members of the Swisher Cigar Company and Thurston the Great. Unfortunately, it was neglected for decades as structural damage, a lack of security, funds and revolting vandalism left the building in a state of disrepair.



If you do a search on Greenlawn Abbey, you will see many photographs taken by 'urban explorers' on illicit missions. They did damage to the site also, as did homeless people and crackheads who stole some of the bronze gates for scrap. It is vile, what people did to this building.



It's a miracle that this statue has remained intact. It's inside the Sells Family crypt. Notice the bricked in window that once held a beautiful stained glass window.

The Green Lawn Abbey Preservation Association has been doing a heroic effort in simply trying to keep the building intact. Just fixing the roof has been a costly enterprise. Today was their open house and fundraiser.



I had no idea the only way to the second floor of the building was through the outisde staircase. There is no access inside from the first to the second floor. Was this to keep the wealthier classes, who took up most of the second floor crypts, apart from the commoners on the first floor? Other things I did not know was that most of the 600 crypts in the mausoleum are used, and the last interment was in the year 2000. Finally seeing the inside of Greenlawn Abbey was a thrill, and it was a pleasure to get a guided tour by one of the many dedicated volunteers who are trying to preserve and maintain this sacred, but little known, landmark.